A limited constitutional government calls for a rules-based, freemarket monetary system, not the topsy-turvy fiat dollar that now exists under central banking. This issue of the Cato Journal examines the case for alternatives to central banking and the reforms needed to move toward free-market money.

The more widespread use of body cameras will make it easier for the American public to better understand how police officers do their jobs and under what circumstances they feel that it is necessary to resort to deadly force.

Americans are finally enjoying an improving economy after years of recession and slow growth. The unemployment rate is dropping, the economy is expanding, and public confidence is rising. Surely our economic crisis is behind us. Or is it? In Going for Broke: Deficits, Debt, and the Entitlement Crisis, Cato scholar Michael D. Tanner examines the growing national debt and its dire implications for our future and explains why a looming financial meltdown may be far worse than anyone expects.

The Cato Institute has released its 2014 Annual Report, which documents a dynamic year of growth and productivity. “Libertarianism is not just a framework for utopia,” Cato’s David Boaz writes in his book, The Libertarian Mind. “It is the indispensable framework for the future.” And as the new report demonstrates, the Cato Institute, thanks largely to the generosity of our Sponsors, is leading the charge to apply this framework across the policy spectrum.

In 2007, supposedly fail-safe circuits in Metrorail’s train detection and control system began to “intermittently malfunction.” This contributed to at least one near miss before the fatal crash, and was the other major reason why nine people died in June.

Clearly, the Washington Metropolitan Area Transportation Authority is short of funds. It still has not begun to replace the 298 cars; instead, it is merely inserting them into the middle of trains so that, in the event of a crash, the will be buffered by newer (and hopefully stronger) cars.

According to the Federal Transit Administration, it will cost nearly $50 billion to bring rail lines in Washington and five other urban areas – New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, and San Francisco – up to a “state of good repair.” Current rates of spending are not even adequate to keep these systems in the miserable condition they are in today. As an official with New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority says with resignation, “there will never be enough money” to restore New York’s rail system to a state of good repair (see p. 15).

The problem, of course, is that rail transit does not come close to paying for itself out of transit fares. Fares cover about 60 percent of the cost of operating Washington’s Metrorail system, but none of the costs of building or maintaining it – and has one of the highest cost recovery ratios in the industry. Transit agencies have convinced most legislators that transit shouldn’t have to pay for itself – but that leaves them perennially short of funds and their patrons in danger of deadly accidents.

Legislators love to fund “ribbons, not brooms” – that is, new, highly visible projects such as the $5.2 billion silver line to Dulles Airport rather than the cost of maintaining the existing system.

So what’s the solution? How about federal regulation of transit agencies? That won’t solve any of the problems, but at least we’ll have a whole new layer of bureaucracy to blame the next time people are killed in a train crash.

The real solution is to stop building expensive rail transit lines that cities can’t afford to maintain. Transit should be privatized, which will lead transit companies to run vehicles – mostly buses – where people want to go, not where bureaucrats and politicians decide they ought to go.

But O’Toole doesn’t fit the portrait of a corporate advocate. On visits to Capitol Hill, he blends in as a middle-aged, middle-height man in a dark suit – but his beard gives him away, its shaggy twists seemingly fitting for a forest dweller. He wears a string tie that most Americans would only recognize on Colonel Sanders. His lapel doesn’t carry the standard-issue flag pin but a bronze bust of his dog, Chip. The Belgian tervuren won it in a dog show.

O’Toole routinely hikes and bikes dozens of miles, and he proudly announces that he has never driven a car to work. Far from living on a luxurious Virginia manor, he left his last Oregon town when it added a third stoplight.

Now, from his home computer in Camp Sherman, Ore., population 300, O’Toole rails against smart-growth policies as money sponges that never calm traffic, fill seats on trains, or help the environment.

The story ends with Randal on his way to a conference in Las Vegas, which I also attended. There in the 80-degree early morning heat, he biked 50 miles each morning, on a folding bicycle that he could fit into a suitcase – and still got back to the hotel in time to fix my Powerpoint before my speech. He’s a Renaissance man.

The terrible Washington Metrorail crash that killed nine people has led to calls for more money for transit. Yet the real problem with Washington Metro, as with almost every other transit agency in this country, is that it has too much money – it just spends the money in the wrong places.

“More money” seems to be the solution to every transit issue. Is ridership down? Then transit agencies need more money to attract more riders. Is ridership up? Then agencies need more money because fares only cover a quarter of the costs.

Yet the truth is that urban transit is the most expensive form of transportation in the United States. Where the average auto user spends about 24 cents per passenger mile, transit costs more than 80 cents per passenger mile, three-fourths of which is subsidized by general taxpayers. Subsidies to auto driving average less than a penny per passenger mile. Where autos carry 85 percent of American passenger travel, transit carries about 1 percent.

When Congress began diverting highway user fees to transit in 1982, it gave transit agencies incentives to invest in high-cost transportation systems such as subways and light rail when lower-cost systems such as buses would often work just as well. Once they build the high-cost systems, the transit agencies never plan for the costs of reconstructing them, which is needed about every 30 years. The Washington Metro system, which was built as a “demonstration project” in the 1970s, is just a little ahead of the curve.

Now over 30 years old, Washington’s subways are beginning to break down. Before the recent accident, some of the symptoms were broken rails, smoke in the tunnels, and elevator and escalator outages.

Now we learn that the National Transportation Safety Board told Metro in 2006 to replace the cars that crashed on Monday because they were in danger of “telescoping,” which is what killed so many people in Monday’s accident. Also, the brakes were overdue for maintenance. Metro responded that it planned to eventually replace the obsolete cars, but didn’t have the money for it.

But it does have money to build an expensive new rail line to Tysons Corner and, eventually, Dulles Airport. Planners had originally recommended running bus-rapid transit along this route, but that wasn’t expensive enough so Metro decided to go with rails instead – at ten times the cost of the bus line.

The simple problem is that we have forgotten about the need to weigh revenues and costs. Instead, transit has become a favorite form of pork barrel and, for the slightly more idealistic, a method of social engineering, meaning a part of the Obama administration’s campaign to “coerce people out of their cars.”